 Modern media has a morality problem. So many of the most popular movies and TV shows depict awful characters doing horrible things to other people, and instead of treating these as cautionary tales, it seems that we're now supposed to look at them as role models. But when I've talked about this on Out of Frame in the past, I've often gotten comments from people complaining that good characters are boring, or that these shows and movies are just depicting reality as it is — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. A shocking number of people seem to believe that the world is a horrible place, and humanity is irredeemable. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. This attitude is why I have a ton of comments on my videos about Thanos defending his insane and patently incorrect brand of Malthusian population control. This kind of misanthropy is everywhere, and I think a lot of us have just come to expect it. Thing is, the stories we tell each other matter. Stories are our primary means of making sense of the world around us, and they have a profound effect on what we believe. Not only in terms of what we all think is true or false, but in terms of what values and premises we accept. In the words of Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, As a race, we're kind of immortal. You know, I mean, we reproduce. Individually, we don't. But, you know, we reproduce, and we have children. They're sort of clones of ourselves. But the one thing that doesn't copy over, the one thing you can't reproduce, is experience. The human body is like the hardware, and I feel like stories of the software that you sort of load into the new child. But what if we're downloading malware into our brains instead? What happens when the stories we surround ourselves with each and every day tell us the wrong things, and warp our perspective? Well, I actually think we end up with a society that looks a lot like what we've seen for the last few years. Fortunately, I've got some ideas on what to do about all this, and that's what I wanted to talk about today on this episode of Out of Frame. I've talked a lot on this series about the importance of stories, but I started thinking about it again recently when I put out a short episode on the Netflix series Arcane. In that video, I expressed a mild criticism of the show, which I liked overall, by the way, that it didn't have very many morally good characters. And, well, I would have liked to see that. Apparently, this was the worst possible thing anyone has ever wished for, because a lot of folks showed up to make one of basically three comments. Some complained that there were good characters, like Echo and Caitlyn. That's true, ish, but as I said, there weren't very many, and in most of those cases, we don't spend much time with them. Others said that good characters are inherently boring Mary Seuss, and they prefer shows that focus on protagonists with questionable morality because they're more interesting. I don't actually agree, but that's largely a matter of opinion, so whatever. Still others said that the whole point of the show was that no one is morally good, and that we would all regularly do bad things if we lived under the same type of conditions. I have issues with all the other claims, but this deeply nihilistic theme kept coming up again and again across hundreds of comments. The world is too complicated to hold anyone to consistent standards. Good and bad don't really exist anyway, and besides, who are you to judge what anyone does? Nothing matters. I'm honestly worried that this negativity reflects an increasingly common worldview. It seems to be especially pervasive in modern media. In fact, part of the reason I said I was hoping for more characters to root for in Arcane was because it seems so incredibly cliched at this point to tell ultra-dark stories. A depressing world where horrible things are constantly happening to people who are themselves mostly complicit in making their world worse for everyone? Where have we seen that before? Everywhere. Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Oranges the New Black, 24, Oz, House of Cards, Utopia, Sharp Objects, Dead to Me, The Magicians, Vikings, Ozark, Westworld, Peaky Blinders, Narcos, Dark. The list of bleak shows from the last 10 years or so is extremely long. They all feature a cast of characters who range from amoral to downright evil. Anyone who is good or heroic is necessarily naive, and as a result, they're either killed off, or so many horrible things happen to them that they lose sight of their own morality over time. The question that I keep pondering lately is, why is this so common? Why do so many TV and film writers push this narrative so often? Going back to what I said at the beginning, a lot of people seem to think that morally good heroes are boring. And while I think this can often be the case, I'd argue that it's a consequence of bad writing rather than an inherent conceptual problem. The whole idea that good people make for uninteresting characters seems to reflect an inverted understanding of reality. What I think is actually happening is that film and TV writers just aren't very good at creating interesting, morally upstanding characters. Not that those characters can't be written well. And in the last few years, I've started to question whether or not most writers even understand what defines good and bad in morality. It's fine to write a protagonist who is a horrible person, if you at least recognize that they're actually bad guys. But lately, it seems like we end up with horrible protagonists being presented as heroes. Characters that used to be pretty good have even been rebooted as much worse human beings. I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, and I don't want to be totally uncharitable, but Hollywood isn't exactly an industry known for its moral compass. Maybe they're just writing what they believe. Maybe they, like many of my commenters, just think that it's more interesting. But there are a ton of incredibly interesting morally heroic characters in cinema and television history. Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Luke Skywalker. Rob Roy, Captain America, Peggy Carter, Din Djarin, Ted Lasso, Mal Reynolds and Zoe Washburn. Eddie Edwards, Leanne Tui, Atticus Finch, John Coffee, Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, Frozone, Naruto Uzumaki, Edward Elric, Sophie Hatter, Christopher Chance, Hubb and Garth McCann. Superman, at least the version from All-Star Superman. Paddington too. What? And yeah, sure, Paddington the Bear. I could go on, but the point is there are all kinds of morally excellent characters that are also rather emphatically not boring. These are people, and bears, who know the difference between right and wrong and who always work to do the right thing, even though it's not always easy to do. And yet none of them are perfect or skate through life without any problems. It's absolutely possible to create well-written, complex, engaging characters who are morally good and yet still have to deal with dramatic struggles. The whole idea that good characters have to be one-dimensional Mary Sue's is nonsense. But in order to write those kinds of characters, you do actually have to have a clear concept of right and wrong. So let's talk about that. Some of you may be thinking that I'm already way ahead of myself. If good and bad don't really even exist, who am I to judge, right? Fair enough. But the thing is, good and bad do exist. On a purely practical note, if you want a free and prosperous society that works well for the vast majority of people, we all need to uphold a specific set of values, most of which flow from the concept of individualism. Some people call these ideas natural rights, but they're anything but natural. They're moral principles we have to consciously choose to live by. But when we do, we make everything around us better. I'm talking about the right to life so that no one has to worry about the constant threat of physical assault or murder, the right to property so that no one has to worry about the products of their productive effort being stolen from them, the right to liberty and due process so that people aren't arrested or imprisoned without just cause, the right to freedom of speech so we can express ourselves, explore new ideas, and uncover truths about the world, the right to participate in the economy trading freely under decentralized power structures instead of being forced to obey the demands of a dictator. All of these rights are based on the core principle that individual people are unique moral agents with their own legitimate expectations of personal autonomy and that our ethics and laws should strive to treat all people equally. Even if you're not religious and don't believe in some kind of divine origin for these ideas, as I do not, these values still matter on both practical and principle grounds. Any society that rejects natural rights will suffer and ultimately fail. So what defines good or bad in people is largely the degree to which someone exemplifies these ideals in their personal lives and supports a society that upholds them for everyone. Good people treat others with respect and allow them to make their own choices. They accept the decisions other people make for themselves even if they don't agree with them. Bad people treat others as expendable or as pawns to be used for their own benefit. They seek to control other people and dictate what they're allowed to do with their own lives and property. Good people create healthy relationships with everyone around them and those good relationships build good societies. Bad people create toxic relationships, hurt their families, friends, neighbors, and anyone unfortunate enough to do business with them. They rob and steal and interact with others through force and violence. Good people uphold institutions that support the protection of individual rights for everyone, not just themselves. Bad people use power to benefit themselves and their allies at the expense of everyone else. The communities and societies we get when bad people are the norm are disastrous, corrupt kleptocracies that impoverish billions. I think on some level most of us understand this reality regardless of the mental gymnastics some folks use to deny it. Now is it easy to break down the world into two simplistic categories of good and bad? No, of course not. People are a mix of both, pretty much all the time. Being bad often brings short-term benefits to the unethical person because they're able to take what they want and not worry about the damage they're doing to anyone else. It's pretty obvious why that would be very tempting in a lot of situations. Being a genuinely good person is a heck of a lot harder. You have to actually think about what you're doing to other people and forego immediate satisfaction if getting what you want would violate someone else's rights. Being a good person means facing challenges and obstacles that other people will never have to bear. And if that's not the basis for great complex drama, I don't know what is. I mean, take Luke Skywalker. When we first meet him, he's just a kid from the middle of nowhere who's dreaming of big adventure. He doesn't know what he's getting into at all, but when his aunt and uncle are killed, he answers Princess Leia's call for help. He's not perfect. He has to be trained in the ways of the force. He makes some major mistakes. He has to learn and grow in order to become a better version of himself. And he has to make difficult choices that don't always work out the way he hopes. But what's never in doubt is his moral code. Luke is fighting against an immensely powerful dictator, risking his life repeatedly to save his friends and bring freedom to the galaxy. And he does it with a sense of redemptive hope and optimism. An even better example might be Mal Reynolds from the Tim Miniar and Joss Whedon series Firefly. He's not nearly as optimistic a character, but that's because he's what might have happened to someone like Luke Skywalker if the rebellion had failed and the Empire captured even more power across the galaxy. And yet in spite of being driven by a deep sense of failure and loss, Mal is consistently making choices to help people in need, defend his crew, trade with other people honestly and fairly, and fight the alliance throughout the series and the movie. In a lot of ways, he's the epitome of what I'm talking about in terms of storytelling. He is a fundamentally good character, but the world has beaten him down. Once again, he's not perfect and makes all sorts of mistakes, but at his core, he's driven by upholding all those principles I talked about earlier. Even when doing so leaves him broke, sometimes broken, and often a wanted criminal. Heroic characters that model good values do not have to be boring or weak. And in fact, they shouldn't be, because being a good person is usually far harder and involves way more personal sacrifices than being bad. So it's a terrible shame that we don't get more heroic characters in the media that surrounds us every day, especially since the media we consume affects our thinking about the world. There's a lot of evidence on this. When we surround ourselves with terrible role models and content that promotes horrible ideas, we start to adapt our own behavior and values to those models. So it's no surprise the kids who grew up watching a lot of TV now believe grotesquely false ideas about humanity and morality, or just wind up falling into the everything bagel of nothingness that is nihilism. Anti-heroes and stories about cretinous villains are fine. I'm not and have never been here to tell you what to watch. But this stuff does matter. The more you consume dark nightmarish fiction about people who do awful things, the more you're going to lose sight of what's good about the world. The long speech I give to young men sounds like you need to hear a piece of it. Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything. I'm not saying that every show or movie needs to focus on the positive side of humanity, but we need way more of that in our entertainment media than we have now. Doing the right thing is rarely the easiest way to get what you want, and when all we ever see in the media we consume are people who lie, cheat, steal, and hurt other people, we start to think that that's the only way to succeed in life. If we never provide anyone with decent role models to follow, what kind of society do we even expect to get? That's why it's important to use the stories we tell each other to represent better values. Our ancient myths and legends were mainly designed to do exactly that, but I think we've forgotten about it in modern storytelling. So the next time you sit down and make a choice about what show to watch or what movie to go see, consider choosing one that isn't depressing and doesn't reinforce a sense of misanthropy or nihilism. Consider choosing to fill your mind with stories about how to be a better person instead. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this, it's that it's totally possible to have great characters that are also good people. But if you still disagree, let me know in the comments and we'll talk about it. I want to say a huge thank you to all our supporters on Patreon and subscribe star, with a special shout out to our Associate Producers. To Oran, The Sheep X, Connor McGowan, Dan Rich, Matt Curtis, Matt Tabor, Richard Lawrence, and Robert Lawyer, thank you. For everyone else, be sure to leave a comment, like this video and subscribe to the channel, join the continuing conversation on Discord, and follow us on all the social media. I'll see you next time.